Since I was busy yesterday, I figured that I would make up Happy Hump Day today. This week, with the 4th of July around the corner, I figured a Fireworks laden story is a must.
The year was...let's just say a few years ago and leave it at that. The setting was my home. I was young...er than I am now. We had made a trip down to Missouri and picked up the most fireworks we had ever gotten. We actually filled dad's trunk. It was impressive. We had firecrackers, bottle rockets, mortars, you name it, dad had it. We also figured that in order to do it safely we should have a bit of extra fuse. Turns out, dad ended up with 500 yards of cannon fuse. We had a great fourth and used almost every piece of fireworks we had (I think we had 3 bottle rockets and a couple strings of firecrackers left). What about the canon fuse, you ask? Yup, you guessed it, we had at least 450 yards of cannon fuse left as well. And that's where this story really begins.
The first thing you need to understand is that my dad had a memory like a rusty steel trap. By that I mean that it was usually stuck open, but would snap shut on the weirdest memories at the weirdest times. In other words, he would forget about a lot of irrelevant things and you could count on him forgetting things that held no day to day relevance (until he needed to remember it). This meant that us kids used it to our advantage. For instance, we knew that dad would forget that he had a dozen cookies and that thus we were clear to eat them. This worked most times. We just had to take note of how many dad had eaten and whether or not he might want more. And thus we knew he would forget about the roll of cannon fuse. Especially if he didn't see it every day. Thus about a month later I pulled it out from the back of the shed so my friends and I could experiment.
After determining that it was near useless as a fire starter, and that its burn rate was consistent (I can't remember what it was), we decided to use it for more interesting experiments. About that same time, my friend John found an old piece of sewer pipe in our local junkyard. It was about 3 ft long and a good 6 inches in diameter. He also discovered a small cache of used bowling balls in the same junkyard. After parting with about $20 of our combined money, we had these in our possession. At first we just stared at our new acquisitions. We already knew the bowling balls were a snug fit in the pipe, but other than that we had no idea why we bought them. That was until our friend Tom came along.
"Buildin' a cannon?" He asked innocently.
I saw John's eyes go wide just as the light came on in my head. "Yes...Yes we are." We said simultaneously.
At that point things began to happen rapidly. We decided to build the cannon in the back of John's truck as we figured we wouldn't want to lift it after it was built (we couldn't fire it at home for obvious reasons). Thus it was that with a lot of careful planning and thought (mainly a lot of guess work and nodding), we had a cannon sitting in John's truck. Allow me to describe this work of 4 teenagers with limited resources (namely what we were able scrounge up or "borrow"). The base was a 3 ft by 3 ft square of concrete 12 inches thick (turns out dad had a few scrap 2x12's sitting in the barn) with a hunk of sewer pipe sticking out of it at roughly a 45 degree angle. We had drilled a hole slightly larger than the cannon fuse we had into the pipe using a borrowed drill and drill bits. As we stared at our creation while the cement dried we discussed where to go to test fire the cannon and what to use as propellant. More precisely, whose father would unknowingly supply the propellant, since all of our fathers had black powder rifles at home. We decided that since it was a group effort, we would all contribute equally. Thus it was that we ended up in the middle of a field overlooking a pond with 6 one pound cans of black powder, 5 bowling balls, 450 feet of cannon fuse, and our homemade cannon.
The next debate which reared its head was how much powder to use. We argued for what must have been an hour before John insisted that we remove the cannon from the back of his truck prior to firing it. He used the tried and true method of getting up a bunch of speed in reverse then slamming on the brakes. The cannon managed to land upright and bury itself 4 inches into the soft field aimed in the general direction of the pond. After John had moved his truck a good 50 ft from the cannon we commenced to load it. As we poured in the powder we decided to fill it enough to cover the fuse hole and hide the concrete bottom. This amount was approximately 1 can. For those of you not familiar with black powder, a typical rifle uses less than 1/2 ounce of black powder and most cannons use maybe 1/2 pound to launch a 12 pound ball. Our bowling balls were about 11 pounds and we used a full pound of black powder. Because our fathers used black powder to hunt, we were familiar with how to load a black powder rifle and used those principles on the cannon. Thus we used newspaper as wadding between the bowling ball and the powder. After packing it in we shoved in the fuse and fed out enough so that we were behind Johns truck for the launch (turns out we were just chicken enough not to kill ourselves), and lit the fuse.
Turns out, when you are waiting for an explosion, fuses burn really slow. They also have a bad habit of reaching the explosive at the exact same time as you poke your head up to make sure it is still burning. Thus I was able to witness the 6 ft flame as the bowling ball left the cannon with a roar. It took me a few minutes to realize why the world was silent and an hour for the sound (ringing though it was) to return. The bowling ball cleared the pond which was at least a quarter mile away and landed in a cloud of dust. I observed my friends jump up and down for a few brief minutes in what I could only assume was celebration. It was then that they realized they couldn't hear either. As we inspected our cannon, we noticed that the based was not only cracked, but broken and buried in the field. The barrel still smoking with remnants of burning newspaper hanging out of it. When our hearing returned, we decided that the cannon should be returned to the junkyard from whence it came and that it was Tom's dad who lost a pound of black powder to "random events."
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